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| 12 Pentecost 27 August, 2006 The Rev. Robert C. Granfeldt |
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Last Sunday, you may recall, our lessons were about as short as they ever get.
Looking them over, I said, at the outset, that there was nothing, really, that leapt out
at us as particularly important or demanding of our attention. Today’s lessons are the
opposite! Jam-packed with all kinds of ideas that just Beg to be commented on –
including one that, nowadays, would be like playing with dynamite to deal with: the
one that says, “wives, be subject to your husbands.”
Even avoiding that one, one could probably preach on these lessons every three
years for a lifetime and never repeat a theme! So, naturally, I’m not going to talk about
any of those things, this morning. Instead, this morning I just want briefly to point out
something about all of them that bears on an important point I’ve touched on fairly
regularly over the years, but without getting really specific! This comes to mind,
especially, because last evening I was speaking to a man who was raised in the
Roman Catholic Church, but has now joined a so-called, “non-denominational”
church, that he likes because it “really believes the Bible!” The man displayed a kind
of simplistic naiveté that neither the faith nor the world can afford any more!
This thing I’ve been pointing to is that when we read scripture, we need always to
have in mind that we are reading things written down a long, long time ago! That, of
course, almost goes without saying. But the realization means something very
important that’s Very hard to grasp: that is that the people we read about, the People
who did the writing, and the People To whom the Scriptures were written, were
simply not very much like us!
It’s hard, really, to grasp the reality of that statement, obvious as it may seem, at first
– because we have nothing, really, to compare with, nothing to give the statement
reality, yet there is much to be misled by. Films, for example, don’t help the situation.
Just think of some of the old “Biblical” films of the past. When we saw Martin Landau,
just a few years ago, and Richard Harris at about the same time, both playing
Abraham; when we see Charlton Heston as Moses, or (here’s a good one),Victor
Mature playing Samson (anyone remember Victor Mature? Anyone remember Samson
and Delilah?), Gregory Peck playing King David, or, of course, blue-eyed Jeffrey
Hunter as Jesus, it’s very hard to hold in mind how really different those people
were! These are actors from our own time, and as much as they might try, and we
might strive to believe, they’re a whole lot more like us than like the people they
portray!
When Abraham left his homeland, Ur, his people and much of the world’s populace
were still living in the late stages of what we call the Stone Age – while in the British
Isles, Stonehenge was hundreds of years, at least, from being built. And the closest
we – you and I – can come to knowing what people were like, in those earliest times,
would be to remember, years ago, when we used to watch those grainy black-and-
white travel films on TV, showing the tribal cultures of Africa, South America, Australia
and New Zealand.
Then, around the time Moses led his people out of Egypt, the city of Troy was being
attacked by the ancient Greeks – and they hacked at each other with bronze swords,
because it was in the middle of the Bronze Age!
Later, the Hebrews struggled with the Philistines from the time of Samson and the
Judges until David finally finished the job; struggled not because the Philistines had
big guys like Goliath fighting for them, but because they had come from far away –
from Europe, in fact – carrying Iron weapons; weapons, the like of which the Hebrews
had never seen, and against which their bronze weapons were almost useless! It was
just the beginning of the iron age in the Middle East!
And the writing, itself, that records all those stories didn’t become established
amongst even the Hebrew elite until David had founded his Kingdom, centuries after
Moses! Writing was in the long process of just being invented!
When Joshua confronts the Hebrews and forces them to make a choice, in this
morning’s lesson, we have to understand that both Joshua and the people he was
addressing were as much polytheists as were the Egyptians and the Amorites they
fought! To them, Yahweh was just one god of many, who happens to be their
ancestral god – a Jealous god, who refuses to share their devotion with any of the
other gods, but wants them to choose – choose between them and him! It’s easy for
us, as we read scriptures like this to gloss that over – to kind of assume, without
thinking, that Joshua is telling his people to leave off idol worship, and follow the
one true God! But that’s clearly not what he’s saying. He’s telling them to leave those
other gods, whose reality he does not question, and join him in worshipping this
other god – the LORD!
Even that word, LORD is problematic and misleading. We see “LORD” and we think it’
s just an alternative word for “God” – but look at the way it’s printed, here – with a
large capital “L” and the rest of the word in small capitals! That is a convention to
honor the Jewish Custom of never speaking – or even spelling out, completely – the
name of God! What Joshua, essentially, is saying, is “stop following those gods –
gods like Alalu or Astarte – and follow this other god, named YHWH! He never
questions the actual existence of those other gods!
And while the seeds of monotheism may, in fact, be found in found in the writings of
the time of David and Solomon, those seeds don’t really bear fruit until the time of
the Prophets – when the new religion finally begins to come into its own.
In our Epistle, this morning, when Saint Paul, writing a thousand years after David,
tells us that, “wives must be subject in all things to their husbands,” rather than
resent his chauvinism, we need to understand that he’s writing to a society and an
age when women are, and always have been, by law, custom and nature, property!
And we need to realize that rather than being simply a curmudgeon (which he was,
but not actually on this subject) Paul is actually being very progressive, very modern,
very liberal in his attitudes toward women and family!
And, in our Gospel, when Jesus speaks – as he has been these past few weeks –
about his Body and Blood as the true bread and wine, he is speaking to people who
are still close enough to primitive practice to be threatened by his words. And when
he really crosses the line – as in last week’s Gospel – in telling them that they must
eat his body and drink his blood, we must understand the effect of those words on
his hearers! They’re horrified! And if we don’t understand that what the disciples are
hearing in Jesus’ words is cannibalism, then we can’t possibly understand why they
would find the teaching “difficult”, and we certainly won’t see why, “many of his
disciples turned back and no longer went about with him,” leaving him, apparently,
with not many more than the Twelve: his closest friends!
Some years ago, in a clergy gathering, I mentioned cannibalism in a discussion of the
Eucharist and I was jumped on by a whole bunch of clergy! They were horrified that I
would even mention such a word in that context – which just told me they hadn’t
done their homework. They – and most of us – don’t seem to understand that
cannibals do not eat human flesh for Nourishment! Rather it’s a mystical act, by which
the person takes into himself the attributes of the other – whether courage or
strength or spirit! A typical practice would be the warrior eating the heart of his
vanquished opponent in order to take to himself the opponent’s courage and wisdom!
And that is precisely what the Eucharist is! It’s Jesus doing the unexpected, again;
Jesus surprising and shocking his followers! He takes the ancient and far-flung – if
not universal – practice of ritual cannibalism, and he raises it to a different level,
translates it from the literal into the spiritual and transforms it into the sacrament of
Communion with the Divine! And he promises that when we “do this” – when we eat
this bread and drink this wine – we will be receiving Him into our hearts and minds
and souls, making his reality part of ourselves!
But if we don’t understand the context – if we don’t understand where the teaching
comes from, to whom it’s given, and what it means, literally, on its own terms – we can’
t perceive it’s truth.
And if we don’t understand all that, we can’t really free ourselves from all the literal
meanings of Scripture that can keep us from growing in the truth – like the man I
spoke with last evening at the wedding reception.
The Scriptures, and the truth they are given us to convey, are a process! The stories
they tell began four thousand years ago and more, literally at the dawn of civilization
and at the very outset of history, and it is the job of the Church in every age – the job
of the Church, today – our job – to continue the process; to continue to discover the
unfolding Truth of God and of man – as our Scriptures and our Lord have been given
to reveal it.
In Jesus Christ’s Name. Amen.
Looking them over, I said, at the outset, that there was nothing, really, that leapt out
at us as particularly important or demanding of our attention. Today’s lessons are the
opposite! Jam-packed with all kinds of ideas that just Beg to be commented on –
including one that, nowadays, would be like playing with dynamite to deal with: the
one that says, “wives, be subject to your husbands.”
Even avoiding that one, one could probably preach on these lessons every three
years for a lifetime and never repeat a theme! So, naturally, I’m not going to talk about
any of those things, this morning. Instead, this morning I just want briefly to point out
something about all of them that bears on an important point I’ve touched on fairly
regularly over the years, but without getting really specific! This comes to mind,
especially, because last evening I was speaking to a man who was raised in the
Roman Catholic Church, but has now joined a so-called, “non-denominational”
church, that he likes because it “really believes the Bible!” The man displayed a kind
of simplistic naiveté that neither the faith nor the world can afford any more!
This thing I’ve been pointing to is that when we read scripture, we need always to
have in mind that we are reading things written down a long, long time ago! That, of
course, almost goes without saying. But the realization means something very
important that’s Very hard to grasp: that is that the people we read about, the People
who did the writing, and the People To whom the Scriptures were written, were
simply not very much like us!
It’s hard, really, to grasp the reality of that statement, obvious as it may seem, at first
– because we have nothing, really, to compare with, nothing to give the statement
reality, yet there is much to be misled by. Films, for example, don’t help the situation.
Just think of some of the old “Biblical” films of the past. When we saw Martin Landau,
just a few years ago, and Richard Harris at about the same time, both playing
Abraham; when we see Charlton Heston as Moses, or (here’s a good one),Victor
Mature playing Samson (anyone remember Victor Mature? Anyone remember Samson
and Delilah?), Gregory Peck playing King David, or, of course, blue-eyed Jeffrey
Hunter as Jesus, it’s very hard to hold in mind how really different those people
were! These are actors from our own time, and as much as they might try, and we
might strive to believe, they’re a whole lot more like us than like the people they
portray!
When Abraham left his homeland, Ur, his people and much of the world’s populace
were still living in the late stages of what we call the Stone Age – while in the British
Isles, Stonehenge was hundreds of years, at least, from being built. And the closest
we – you and I – can come to knowing what people were like, in those earliest times,
would be to remember, years ago, when we used to watch those grainy black-and-
white travel films on TV, showing the tribal cultures of Africa, South America, Australia
and New Zealand.
Then, around the time Moses led his people out of Egypt, the city of Troy was being
attacked by the ancient Greeks – and they hacked at each other with bronze swords,
because it was in the middle of the Bronze Age!
Later, the Hebrews struggled with the Philistines from the time of Samson and the
Judges until David finally finished the job; struggled not because the Philistines had
big guys like Goliath fighting for them, but because they had come from far away –
from Europe, in fact – carrying Iron weapons; weapons, the like of which the Hebrews
had never seen, and against which their bronze weapons were almost useless! It was
just the beginning of the iron age in the Middle East!
And the writing, itself, that records all those stories didn’t become established
amongst even the Hebrew elite until David had founded his Kingdom, centuries after
Moses! Writing was in the long process of just being invented!
When Joshua confronts the Hebrews and forces them to make a choice, in this
morning’s lesson, we have to understand that both Joshua and the people he was
addressing were as much polytheists as were the Egyptians and the Amorites they
fought! To them, Yahweh was just one god of many, who happens to be their
ancestral god – a Jealous god, who refuses to share their devotion with any of the
other gods, but wants them to choose – choose between them and him! It’s easy for
us, as we read scriptures like this to gloss that over – to kind of assume, without
thinking, that Joshua is telling his people to leave off idol worship, and follow the
one true God! But that’s clearly not what he’s saying. He’s telling them to leave those
other gods, whose reality he does not question, and join him in worshipping this
other god – the LORD!
Even that word, LORD is problematic and misleading. We see “LORD” and we think it’
s just an alternative word for “God” – but look at the way it’s printed, here – with a
large capital “L” and the rest of the word in small capitals! That is a convention to
honor the Jewish Custom of never speaking – or even spelling out, completely – the
name of God! What Joshua, essentially, is saying, is “stop following those gods –
gods like Alalu or Astarte – and follow this other god, named YHWH! He never
questions the actual existence of those other gods!
And while the seeds of monotheism may, in fact, be found in found in the writings of
the time of David and Solomon, those seeds don’t really bear fruit until the time of
the Prophets – when the new religion finally begins to come into its own.
In our Epistle, this morning, when Saint Paul, writing a thousand years after David,
tells us that, “wives must be subject in all things to their husbands,” rather than
resent his chauvinism, we need to understand that he’s writing to a society and an
age when women are, and always have been, by law, custom and nature, property!
And we need to realize that rather than being simply a curmudgeon (which he was,
but not actually on this subject) Paul is actually being very progressive, very modern,
very liberal in his attitudes toward women and family!
And, in our Gospel, when Jesus speaks – as he has been these past few weeks –
about his Body and Blood as the true bread and wine, he is speaking to people who
are still close enough to primitive practice to be threatened by his words. And when
he really crosses the line – as in last week’s Gospel – in telling them that they must
eat his body and drink his blood, we must understand the effect of those words on
his hearers! They’re horrified! And if we don’t understand that what the disciples are
hearing in Jesus’ words is cannibalism, then we can’t possibly understand why they
would find the teaching “difficult”, and we certainly won’t see why, “many of his
disciples turned back and no longer went about with him,” leaving him, apparently,
with not many more than the Twelve: his closest friends!
Some years ago, in a clergy gathering, I mentioned cannibalism in a discussion of the
Eucharist and I was jumped on by a whole bunch of clergy! They were horrified that I
would even mention such a word in that context – which just told me they hadn’t
done their homework. They – and most of us – don’t seem to understand that
cannibals do not eat human flesh for Nourishment! Rather it’s a mystical act, by which
the person takes into himself the attributes of the other – whether courage or
strength or spirit! A typical practice would be the warrior eating the heart of his
vanquished opponent in order to take to himself the opponent’s courage and wisdom!
And that is precisely what the Eucharist is! It’s Jesus doing the unexpected, again;
Jesus surprising and shocking his followers! He takes the ancient and far-flung – if
not universal – practice of ritual cannibalism, and he raises it to a different level,
translates it from the literal into the spiritual and transforms it into the sacrament of
Communion with the Divine! And he promises that when we “do this” – when we eat
this bread and drink this wine – we will be receiving Him into our hearts and minds
and souls, making his reality part of ourselves!
But if we don’t understand the context – if we don’t understand where the teaching
comes from, to whom it’s given, and what it means, literally, on its own terms – we can’
t perceive it’s truth.
And if we don’t understand all that, we can’t really free ourselves from all the literal
meanings of Scripture that can keep us from growing in the truth – like the man I
spoke with last evening at the wedding reception.
The Scriptures, and the truth they are given us to convey, are a process! The stories
they tell began four thousand years ago and more, literally at the dawn of civilization
and at the very outset of history, and it is the job of the Church in every age – the job
of the Church, today – our job – to continue the process; to continue to discover the
unfolding Truth of God and of man – as our Scriptures and our Lord have been given
to reveal it.
In Jesus Christ’s Name. Amen.
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| Calvary Episcopal Church, Rockdale |
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